About

Before embarking on the journey of freelance consulting I worked at Microsoft Services as a Consultant.I'm a software engineer from Aalborg University. Between June '05 and June '07 I was a Microsoft Student Partner in Denmark.

I mainly blog on software related issues. This includes new technology and Microsoft's .NET platform.

For starters, Shane, kudos to you for sticking to your guns, and for figuring out really quickly that this was clearly not a place you wanted to work–a lot of developers have a mentality that says that they need the company more than the company needs them, sort of a “job at any price” mindset.

It fits nicely with a previous post of mine on Good Programmers vs. Bad Programmers. For many reasons this quote fits perfectly with my exprerience as job hunter, but also from observing the people I know.

I’ve been doing some WCF development on Vista using Orcas Beta 2 for a project I’m starting. I ran into a couple of issues with this configuration. I wanted to expose a service on an HTTP endpoint, but Vista doesn’t allow this. To enable it you have to add a rule to the HTTP namespace in HTTP.sys in the kernel. Nicholas Allen has a post on what and how to do it.

So I’m getting my things ready and packed for my trip to JAOO tomorrow. I’ll catch a train at 7 AM, and hit Århus around 8:20 for 3 packed days. It’s going to be great. Niels and Mark published their conference schedules online, I guess we’ll see if we have overlapping sessions. Most of my slots are filled with 2 or 3 sessions, so I’ll have to pick one out at the spur of the moment. I even packed my camera, so I’ll have to take some pictures of the whole setup.

A sufficiently dumb engineer may hurt you more than most competitors will. When organized in loose formations, even in modest numbers, they can even kill an otherwise healthy business.

Kontsevoy follow up post deals with the Ecosystems of Smart Hackers, which deals with how these dumb engineers gets hired in the first place.

There are many different factors that allow these unqualified individuals to get engineering jobs, lack of decent interviewers is certainly a big one. … What I discovered was shocking: literally everyone can get a programming job if he or she simply goes to enough interviews and tells the same made up story in response to “so… what exactly did you do at company X? Your resume said you wrote reporting system using Java and DB2…”

Answering the question as to whether good programmers costs more or not:

As shocking as it may appear, money is not everything. Smart people like to hang out with other smart people. Similarly, mediocrity comes in volumes too.

I especially like this last quote: “mediocrity comes in volumes”. So true, so true.

Posted in Book,Misc by Kristian Kristensen on the September 14th, 2007

Last night I finished the book “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg. Rosenberg follows the development of Chandler – a revolutionary PIM. The visionary behind Chandler is Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame, and a number of prominent developers joins the project. Parallel with the story about Chandler Rosenberg discusses why software development/engineering is difficult. He cites a number of classic Comp. Sci. research pieces like “The Mythical Man Month” by Fred Brooks. It’s a good book and easy read about the inherent difficulties in developing software.

There’s an article on Version2 today about me winning the ticket for JAOO. The article’s headline is Software Engineer Wins JAOO Ticket (it’s in Danish). So I guess it’s really, really official
Yesterday in my winning haze I forgot to write about the extend of the ticket. It’s valid for the 3 conference days between 24th and 26th September.

The email was from Version2 – a Danish IT magazine – who had a competition last week. The basic premise was that if you added or edited an article in their IT encyclopedia you would be in the drawing for 2 tickets for JAOO. So I just jumped in an added a couple of definitions. Before it was over I guess I’ve added ASP, Web 2.0, LINQ, C#, and Lamdba. Some of these were definitely more elaborate than others, but that wasnt really part of the competition. Anyway, I won Super cool! I know that Jakob (former co-MSP of mine) is going, so is Mark (also MSP), as well as the guys from Microsoft Denmark’s DPE department.

I read some where (forgot where) that the thing about Apple is that they never stop improving their products. The push the limits, ships something, an then immediately starts pushing again. Just look at the release cycles of iPods. Eventhough parts of previous iPod lineup are good enough, it doesn’t matter. They keep pushing, pushing, pushing.

I attended a Silverlight event in Århus last week, where I also met up with Niels (an MSP from Århus University) afterwards. It was a mighty fun day, especially after the presentations
Now that 1.0 is out the door I can’t wait to see 1.1 in a more stable form. I’ve recently looked into Adobe Flex, which is very, very, frickin’ cool!